The lonely neighbors of William Faulkner

Our shared mythology is real, just not the real it claims to be

Whatever you think of Mississippi, it’s probably not accurate. Not even that famous quote by William Faulkner is accurate: He supposedly once said, “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”

I read that on an embroidered pillow a few years ago, when I was, very briefly, just for a weekend, the writer in residence at an old Colonial revival mansion in Jackson, Mississippi. Built in 1908 by a lumber tycoon, it traded hands many times until they turned it into a hotel in the mid 2000s — a grand, sprawling fantasy memory of a time that never was, filled with chandeliers and curio cabinets and flower arrangements and marble busts, a maze of dining rooms and sitting areas that creaked wherever you walked and made you, at all times, feel underdressed.

I discovered the pillow in question on a couch in my room, a room which had its own private, rickety elevator from the bed up to the dining hall. I provided a nightly spectacle for the other guests, because to get back down I had to use an ornate key to clack open a single door on the far wall. I would then enter the tiny space, turn, wave to my fellow patrons, pull it shut and disappear until morning. It was not a pleasant place down there. Red carpet. Cream walls. Windows abutting lawn. The bedroom transitioned into a parlor decorated like the lobby of an old funeral home. The only door, aside from the one that led to the elevator, opened into the abandoned garage of the home’s previous owners where stacks of books and old furniture looked to have met their end.

I was in this place because I had been invited to speak at an event, and the organizers, in a fine gesture to which I still owe them gratitude, placed me in residence far above my station. In fact, I used my alone time to work on the copy for a very un-Southern gig, a Reebok commercial I had lucked into where I was to play a fake version of myself interviewing experts and athletes about how to “be more human,” their new campaign set to launch during that year’s Super Bowl. Still, in a most Southern fashion, I spent most of my time writing in the perennially empty bar, so empty I never met a bartender. It was adorned with the books, portraits, and paintings of famous Southern writers who I was sure had never slept at the bottom of this particular elevator shaft, a million pieces of fine cutlery above them. But they would have, the spirits of the decorators assured me, if it had been a hotel when Eudora Welty was alive.

The first night there, before bed, I noticed the staff had placed a chunk of chocolate on my sheets with the same Faulkner quote printed on the wrapping paper as had been embroidered on the pillow. “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” There it was, in visual stereo, lying to me like the room and the bar and all the rest.

I know because I went looking for that quote in Faulkner’s things. I walked between the cedars that stood like ancient columns flanking the pathway leading to the entrance of his famed mansion in Oxford. I went inside and saw the outline of one of his Pulitzer Prize winning novels still neatly scrawled in red and black pencil on the wall of his study. But no quote. It is nowhere to be seen except on the kinds of things they sell in Mississippi gift shops. I’ve sat next to Faulkner’s statue which sits next to the Oxford Courthouse holding a pipe on a bench across from Square Books, that infamous independent Mississippi bookstore to which all Southern writers must periodically pilgrimage because it is where Larry Brown and John Grisham held book signings and Alice Walker and Alan Ginsberg held book readings. Faulkner, to Mississippi, is nearly as mythological as the Celtic Rowan trees for which he named his home, Rowan Oak, so it’s fitting that the quote itself is mythological too.

I’ve turned it every which way I can to try and see if it meant one thing or another — though I have to admit, it could mean just about anything. It could be about pride or shame. It could be about the nakedness of its social stratification, the close relationship everyone has with place and poverty. I could be about racism, hate, and bigotry, or all the mixed perceptions of those things, or the fight against them, or the fight against the fight.

What else? The perpetual strength of an underdog’s perspective? Emmett Till’s necessarily bulletproof memorial? Autodidacts and dirt road philosophers making muscadine wine? The careful politeness that can flip into violence at the first whiff of tainted honor? The church on every corner and in every hollow of one side of town, and the juke joints and liquor stores on every corner of the other? The cornbread? The dead civil rights workers? The lies you tell people beneath a hidden accent so you don’t have to navigate a conversation about your hometown? The charming chimera of self-knowledge and worldly ignorance? The red clay? The pines?

That quote was a messy rorschach in my life up until I solved its riddle. Turns out — “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi” is something Faulkner never even said. It’s just something people there wish he had said. Writer Alicia Barnes tracked it all down in 2013 and found it was misattributed to Faulkner by another writer, Willie Morris, back in 1996. According to Barnes, no one knows where Morris even came up with it. It doesn’t appear anywhere else.

Which is fitting, I think, because to understand Mississippi you have to understand why that quote would be so alluring to the people who live there, who feel apart, stranded on a sociological island where the people who want things to change get ground up with the people who don’t. Where you are alone and neighborly at the same time. And you know this.

And yet, when you leave it, as you must, you will feel homesick. And when you return, as you must, you will feel wanderlust. And only in the pendulum pause of these emotions will you feel clarity, and in those moments you will, as the people in those portraits did, write, or ache to write, and if you do your words might end up lonely neighbors with Faulkner’s words, real or imagined.

So whatever you think of Mississippi, it’s about as accurate as that quote, which is to say that quote is real, just not the kind of real it claims to be.